Fishing, Tracking, and Crime in Wisconsin, with Victoria Houston, DEAD LOUDMOUTH

Hard to believe this is already number 16 of the rural Wisconsin "Loon Lake" mysteries that Victoria Houston braids so adeptly with fly-fishing, bass fishing, tracking, and survival around the lakes and woods. Just goes to show, a book a year adds up! From her first book, Dead Angler, onward, Houston's embrace of her return home to Wisconsin has paid off.

I've found the series uneven at times, so I meandered into DEAD LOUDMOUTH slowly, feeling the water, so to speak. It's a good catch! After a quick prologue to set the tone of vengeful murder, the book opens from the point of view of Police Chief Lew Ferris, quickly partnered (as usual) with her fill-in forensics associate, retired dentist Paul Osborne. Osborne has good news to share (the two have become an occasional couple but always seem to be catching up from separate activities). But Lew (and we) will wait for that news a while, because old-fashioned deputy Roger Adamczak's on Lew's phone with an emergency.

"Two, chief, and they are dead, real dead --"

... She hit the speaker button on her desk phone. "Okay, Roger, start from the beginning, please."

"Chief, we got two bodies. Fragrant derelicts. Know what I mean?"

Lew looked over at Osborne, a puzzled expression on her face.

"I think he means 'in flagrante delicto,'" whispered Osborne... "That means naked and ...," he hesitated as he searched for a polite way to described what he imagined Roger must mean, "...entwined for lack of a better word."

The bodies on the elevated piano at the pricey (and very sexist) "gentlemen's club" near the area's posh private hunting preserve are pretty clearly homicides. Who'd want to kill two people at once? Well, there could be jealous lovers. Unhappy employees. The list goes on, and Doc Osborne barely has time to welcome his visiting granddaughter in between calls to check out what's going wrong in the town's tourist-dependent sporting locales.

But when Doc's granddaughter disappears out on the water while Doc's at work, even Lew's expert tracker (and poacher) buddy Ray Pradt can't find her, and -- there's clearly a murderer on the loose in the same region.

Quick pace, a wonderful sense of Wisconsin out-of-doors, and characters who care about each other -- with these components, Victoria Houston has spun a lively and enjoyable mystery, closer to a "traditional" feel than to a police investigation. I enjoyed it all, and I'll go back for more.

Fly-Fishing, Ice Fishing, and Murder: DEAD RAPUNZEL, Victoria Houston

The 15th Loon Lake, Wisconsin, mystery from Victoria Houston is a satisfying traditional mystery with the flair of Houston's now well-developed characters: Police Chief Lew (Lewellyn) Ferris, who enjoys the community collaboration of her job; Lew's close (yes, very close) friend and fellow fly-fisherman Doc Osborne, a retired dentist who fills in as a death examiner for Lew's team; and the inimitable Ray Pradt, angler and, despite his fish-shaped hat and endless jokes, a magnet for smart savvy women visiting the region (and he's an excellent tracker, too). As in many of the other books in this series, solving the crime draws on the skills of each of these investigators.

Look especially for fishing aspects in DEAD RAPUNZEL, because the title has nothing to do with the long-haired girl in the tower -- the Wilcox Rapunzel Olive is the rather unusual name of an elegant hand-tied fishing fly, pictured below, and the victim who's murdered in the first chapter is herself an angler and ties flies. She's Rudd Tomlinson, a wealthy widow about to open a prestigious museum as a gift to her part of rural Wisconsin. When she's pushed under a logging truck (eww!), the icy weather can't keep Lew and Doc from tracking the killer. The main problem is, so many people have motives for this one! And although the investigation quickly eliminates Rudd's dear friend Judith (also a fly-fisher), plenty of family malice, financial gain, and a lust for power and control mean that half a dozen others are "on the hook," so to speak.

Houston's writing is direct, a good storyteller on a roll. She alternates mostly between Lew's point of view and Doc's, and in this case Doc Osborne is an acute observer of the suspects, including the dead woman's stepdaughter, Sloane, caught trying to take a valuable painting from the victim's home:

Like a muskie fisherman with a lunker on the line, he couldn't help being interested in how this scenario would play out. Sloane, however confident she might be in her attempt to sneak something out of her stepmother's home, had two formidable foes: Lew had the authority of the law while Judith was angered by the attempted theft, which she was not hesitant to block.

"Sloane," said Judith, her voice even, "I don't think you are aware that Rudd was killed in a traffic accident this morning. I'm sorry you have to hear it this way, but I hope that explains why Chief Ferris and Dr. Osborne are here.

"Thing is, her death may not have been an accident. The driver of the truck that hit her has sworn that he saw someone -- a man -- push her. If that's true, she was murdered."

Winter in Wisconsin is no time for fly-fishing, despite the book's title (which in this case refers to some flies in a display case at the victim's home), but Ray Pradt's willing moves, taking Judith ice-fishing, will break open the investigation as the pair of anglers discovers a new range of motives.

the Wilcox Rapunzel fly

There's plenty of Wisconsin in here, along with a healthy dose of fishing, but best of all there's a nicely braided murder investigation that gradually ramps up the tension, until even Chief Ferris herself is in danger.

Houston's 15th is an enjoyable traditional-form mystery; the ice and snow imagery may transport you this summer to a very different season, and the human longings and well-played friendships in DEAD RAPUNZEL can fit quite nicely into the summer reading stack. Pick this one up especially if you enjoy regional mysteries like those of Archer Mayor and Craig Johnson, and for any collection that's covering a range of American states. Fun reading, and it will stand up nicely to a second reading as well.

Edgar Award Nominees: 2015 Juvenile and Young Adult, plus (2014) ONE CAME HOME, Amy Timberlake

Seems the TBR (to-be-read) pile never really dwindles, especially when it's time to add the Edgar Award Nominees. These are selected by the MWA, the Mystery Writers of America, and the award title refers to the late, great Edgar Allen Poe.

Here are the 2015 nominees in the Juvenile category:

Absolutely Truly by Heather Vogel Frederick

Space Case by Stuart Gibbs
Greenglass House by Kate Milford
Nick and Tesla's Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove by "Science Bob" Pflugfelder
and Steve Hockensmith  
Saving Kabul Corner by N.H. Senzai
Eddie Red, Undercover: Mystery on Museum Mile by Marcia Wells

And here are the 2015 nominees in the Young Adult category:

The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi
Nearly Gone by Elle Cosimano
Fake ID by Lamar Giles
The Art of Secrets by James Klise
The Prince of Venice Beach by Blake Nelson 

I'll be gathering a few to read over the next couple of months; the finalists are announced at the Edgars Banquet, which this year is set for April 29.

I gave myself time to read the 2014 "Juvenile" category winner this week -- ONE CAME HOME by Amy Timberlake, also a Newbery Honor Book for 2014. Set in 1871 in Wisconsin, a year of an amazingly huge nesting of passenger pigeons there, this crime fiction/adventure ("A Sister Lost. A Body Found. The Truth Buried.") arrives in the voice of 13-year-old Georgie (Georgina) Burkhardt, whose sister Agatha's body is being buried in the first chapter. Soon Georgie's doubts and guilt about that body send her out investigating how Agatha died -- murder, or not dead after all? -- along with one of Agatha's suitors and riding her own rented mule. Thanks to her shooting skills (she has her own Springfield rifle), Georgie's better prepared than most to deal with violent criminals. But she's not as well prepared for inflicting death on a human. Or, for that matter, for the complications of adult affection playing out in front of her.

It's a good read, loaded with passenger pigeon lore as well as a wonderfully feisty protagonist. Timberlake evokes the landscape, Georgie's state of mind, and the wild vulnerability of American frontier life vividly, and I know I'll want to read this one again. And to share it with a lot of other readers.

Amateur Sleuth with Synesthesia: MURDER WITH A TWIST, Allyson K. Abbott

The second book in Allyson Abbott's "Mack's Bar" series is out! And there's still a chunk of summer left for reading it. That's double-good news, because MURDER WITH A TWIST is a well-written, neatly plotted, and thoroughly enjoyable addition to the hammock-or-chaise-lounge reading list. Abbott is a pseudonym of Wisconsin emergency-room nurse Beth Amos, a confessed adrenaline junkie who brings the quick pace and logical consequences of her double careers into spinning a tale.

Gender clarification first: Mack's Bar is owned by Mackenzie Dalton, whose father brought her into the business in downtown Milwaukee. Since her dad's death, she's sole owner, and doing well enough to expand her floor space, making room for a crowd of local crimesolvers who gather to solve test cases, pose crimes for each other to consider, and incidentally help out the local police force. Mack herself is a "secret weapon" for Detective Duncan Albright, who -- as detailed in the previous title, Murder on the Rocks -- has come to believe in Mack's special abilities, and wants to try using them to sort out criminals and their crimes. Mack can be, he proposes, a sort of human lie detector.

And she'll do this with her special perceptions formed by synesthesia. It's a neurological condition that makes a person's senses get tangled up: Sounds become colors, people become music and smells, and more. Because Mack picks up different sounds when someone's lying, for instance, she could be helpful on the latest case -- if she can handle the gruesome death of a mom, and the residual sense of pain and fear of her kidnapped toddler. Mack lays out the problem when Duncan takes her on a test case before that one, a possible suicide ... or not:

I had thought our little crime games, along with all the preparations I'd been making with Duncan over the past six weeks, would make a real crime scene easier to take. But that wasn't the case ... the hanging man before me that morning was real, frightening, and all too dead. 

While Mack focuses on narrowing the cascade of sounds and smells coming at her, the corpse overwhelms other evidence:

The sight of that bloated, purple face kept triggering a veritable locust plague of reactions. I shook my head, sighed, and looked down at the floor.

Eventually she sorts out impressions and turns out highly valuable to the investigation -- which ought to make the next case simpler, right? Except between the gruesome bloody killing and the child at risk, nothing's simple. Neither is the chemistry between Mack and the detective. And there are perils ahead, neatly layered with action at Mack's Bar.

This is the second synesthesia-based sleuth I've run into this year, so I paused to check on whether synesthesia is more common than I realized. From the Boston-based Synesthia Project, I found this:

How common is synesthesia? The short answer is that no one really knows. The long answer is anywhere from one in every 100,000 people to one in every 5,000 people, but it's difficult to get a good count because of the nature of synesthesia.

Well, that's good enough for me -- I may never have (knowingly) met a synesthete, but I'm willing to have them among the sleuths and especially to buy into the confusing and sometimes debilitating version of it that Abbott, aka Nurse Amos, portrays.

It turns out that a bar full of amateur sleuths is a great device, too, and I'm looking forward to reading more in this series. Amos also writes under a second pseudonym, Annelise Ryan, a forensics pro; I'll be watching for those also. Just goes to show what Dave and I rediscover every month: You think you know a lot of mystery authors and titles, right? But there's always a new good one to discover. Or, in the case of Beth Amos, two of them!

LAKE OF TEARS, Mary Logue: Wisconsin Sheriff Investigation, 9th in Series

The best part about mysteries today is, no matter how many authors you're familiar with, no matter how many books you've collected, there's always a chance of finding one that's new to you -- and enjoying it. That's how I feel about reading LAKE OF TEARS, the ninth in the Claire Watkins series set in Pepin County, Wisconsin, not far from Minnesota's Twin Cities. And I'm really sorry that I didn't meet Mary Logue's books and protagonist sooner!

Claire Watkins is a Deputy Sheriff in small-town Fort St. Antoine, but in the second chapter of LAKE OF TEARS she's launched abruptly into the slot of acting Sheriff, as her boss needs quadruple bypass surgery. Coming out of a quiet summer, she's alert and well rested -- a good thing, with the bones of a small young woman discovered in the ashes of an artsy sort of boat burning that's just taken place for a festival atmosphere on the town's lakeshore. At the same time, Claire's and her husband Rich's daughter Meg, age 18 and lingering in town for an extra semester to earn more money before heading off to college, begins an unexpectedly passionate dating relationship. And it turns out that the man who's caught her attention is actually one of Claire's deputies, a returned veteran of the Afghanistan action, still young in years but weighted with the grief of battle and the death of a friend.

It's challenging enough to have your daughter seeing someone so much "older" in experience (Meg looks older than her age; when Andrew finds out, he does indeed pull back some). But for Claire the really tough part is components of her investigation that make her wonder whether Andrew is involved in the death, or somehow knows related information.

The writing is smooth, the plot intriguing, the twists nicely balanced in terms of surprise and "fitting the evidence" -- all proof that this author of 12 mysteries knows her field and tells a good story. I wasn't always happy with the jumps in point of view -- but still there's power here, as well as wise connections to the trials of returning home from armed conflict. I thought of Julia Spencer-Fleming as I read, even though the parallel emotional story as Claire investigates the crime is less dark than Spencer-Fleming's series: family issues around a normal teen growing up, rather than a sense of moral and spiritual crisis.

Author Mary Logue is also a poet, and this comes through in her precise and rich use of language, without slowing the pace. Try this, as Claire first investigates the burned bones of the murder victim:

She walked up to the remnants of the fire and squatted down down, getting her first real close look at the bones. They were not that easy to see, discolored as they were by the fire. If you looked for them, they almost disappeared. Like one of those Magic Eye games where if you squinted your eyes or blurred your vision, you could see the outline of the bones more easily. ...

A bundle of bones, that's all that was left of someone who was probably alive a couple days ago. Claire had the urge to touch the delicate finger bones of the hand, but resisted. Do not disturb them.

It's not necessarily sensible, but Claire resists the pressure to assume Andrew, the veteran and her new deputy, committed murder in this town. "Yes, she saw some hidden rage in him, but more than anything she saw a well of sadness."

Good thing Claire can stand back and notice that, because she'll need Andrew on her side to solve the case. If, like me, you're new to Mary Logue's books, pick this one up (published by Tyrus, which is widening its dark noir focus to include some really well-written traditional investigative mysteries like this one). And if you're already collecting these, hurrah for adding number nine in this series, and for your good fortune in knowing about this regional author before she works her way into a national reputation for strong crime fiction.

Author website (a bit out of date) here; and check out Tyrus Books here.

Victoria Houston's New Loon Lake Mystery: DEAD INSIDER

Rain clouds are moving across the valley as I write; we are in for another drenched afternoon, and it's becoming "ordinary" to see flood warnings ticking across the TV screen in the evening. What a great season to dip into the newest in Victoria Houston's Loon Lake mystery series, though: DEAD INSIDER, where a catastrophic August rainstorm in northern Wisconsin includes the revelation that, neatly wrapped like butchered meat, parts of a human are floating through the Loon Lake run-off.

Loon Lake Police Chief Lewellyn Ferris knows how to recruit her friends and colleagues to assist her crew in coping with the threat to health, tourism, and safety -- but the media circus that erupts when the victim's identity is revealed goes way beyond her expectations. After all, not only was the murdered woman running for the U.S. Senate, but someone is going to inherit her fortune. Along with the money comes a family heritage that's darker than most, and the possibility of multiple motives.

"Lew" makes a good choice pulling into the case retired dentist "Doc" Osborne. In many ways he's already involved -- much of the action unfolds from his own point of view -- and he's a low-key Watson to her investigation:

During Osborne's first stint as the deputy coroner for the Loon Lake Police Department, Lew had discovered he could be an unexpected asset during the questioning of suspects. The reason? Men and women hear differently. Depending on the listener -- emotions, facts, even words can have ambiguous meanings.

More than once each had surprised the other with an interpretation of a response that changed the direction of the investigation.

Stakes are high, financial, political, powerful, and by pushing into the flood of events and desires around her, Lew raises the risk level as well.

Houston weaves a neat traditional mystery with up-to-the-minute recognition of how small-town life has changed in an era of global politics. This one goes on the "keep it" stack for summer reading (flyfishing! suspense!), regional interest (northern Wisconsin), and well-crafted female police chief (still a rarity). I can already see I'll be watching for the earlier books in the series, which is:

Dead Angler
Dead Creek
Dead Water
Dead Frenzy
Dead Hot Mama
Dead Jitterbug
Dead Boogie
Dead Madonna
Dead Hot Shot
Dead Renegade
Dead Deceiver
Dead Tease
Dead Insider 

The official release date for DEAD INSIDER is June 18. Luckily, there's no need to read the other titles beforehand ... but, like me, you may decide you'd like to gather a few more for the shelf.